Usual trouble - runbib says "error"

Hi Jeremy,

I've tried to reproduce this problem on my development platform, but I
didn't quite "succeed".

I noticed that your data apparently use an uncommon encoding. When I
tried to add them as they are, assuming they're ISO-8859-1 encoded, I
received 10 errors from refdbd. All of the failed references contained
umlauts or the "ae" ligature. I started over, this time converting the
encoding manually:

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 < Thesis.ris | refdbc -d malcolm -C addref -E UTF-8 -o addresult.txt
22850 byte written to addresult.txt
999:576 added:1 skipped:0 failed

This obviously gave better results. One reference was skipped because
it has a duplicate citation key
(UNITED-NATIONS2003CREATION-OF-A-G). As per the publication date these
seem to be different references so you may want to fix this.

I then tried to create the bibliography like this:

refdbib -d malcolm -S Murdoch.Law. -t db31x Thesis.id.xml > Thesis.bib.xml
999:565 retrieved:0 failed:0 not found

That is, no problem on FreeBSD. I'll try to run the same test on
Cygwin tomorrow, maybe the manual character conversion prevents the
libiconv error that I ran into. I also ran the same test using
valgrind. This tool did not report any invalid write attempts,
although approx. 2MB of memory get lost during the test (most of this
is lost by libdbi, not by refdbd itself).

What database engine do you use btw? I'm running PostgreSQL on FreeBSD
and MySQL on Cygwin.

Unfortunately this doesn't get you any closer to a working
bibliography. It may be a platform issue but I wouldn't bet. In order
to further identify what is going wrong, you should try the following:

- remove the citations you last added and see when runbib starts to
  work again. Can you attribute the failure to a single citation?

- can you clean up the reference data by converting them to utf-8
  manually as shown above? You'd best use a test database that uses
  the UTF-8 encoding anyway. Does that affect the outcome in any way?

- please watch whether the bibliography always stops at the same
  point, or whether the failure is rather random. Does it always stop
  at the same reference (you can identify it by looking at the SQL
  queries as many of them refer to "refdb_id" one way or another)?
  Does it always stop after the author query shown in your log
  snippet?

regards,
Markus

Jeremy Malcolm writes:
 > runbib is aborting for me again with the unhelpful message "error", and 
 > I've gone through all the usual reasons why this always happens (eg. 
 > obviously missing fields in references I've added recently, stray colons 
 > in citation keys) to no avail.
-- 
Markus Hoenicka
[email protected]
(Spam-protected email: replace the quadrupeds with "mhoenicka")
http://www.mhoenicka.de


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